Hommel, B.
Leiden University, Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands
Increasing evidence suggests that cognitive control emerges from the interplay between two dopaminergic pathways: a (mesocortical) prefrontal and a (nigro-)striatal pathway. I will summarize and try to integrate a number of recent behavioral-genetics studies from our lab that used various tasks (like task-switching, inhibition of return, stop-signal, and attentional blink tasks) to characterize how the two pathways operate and interact. Taken together, these studies demonstrate a kind of double-dissociation between the functional responsibilities of these pathways: Whereas the prefrontal pathway takes care of the maintenance of goals and the update of goal-related information, the striatal pathway supports cognitive flexibility.